Spectres of Capitalism: A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions

158 Pages·1998·2.48 MB·English

by  Amin

S
p e c t r e s
C
a p i t a l i s m
A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions
Sam ir A m in
SPECTRES OF CAPITALISM
A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions

SPECTRES OF CAPITALISM
A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions
Samir Amin
Translated by Shane H enry Mage
Monthly Review Press
New York
Copyright © 1998 by Monthly Review Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amin, Samir.
[Au-delà du capitalisme. English]
Spectres of capitalism: a critique of current intellectual
fashions / by Samir Amin; translated, Shane Henry Mage,
p. cm.
Translation of: Au-delà du capitalisme.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 147) and index.
ISBN 0-85345-934-7 (cloth). — ISBN 0-85345-933-9 (paper)
1. Capitalism. 2. Economic history. 3. Social history.
4. Postmodernism. I. Title.
HB501.A586513 1998
330. 12’2—dc21 98-9578
CIP
Monthly Review Press
122 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 987654321
Contents
Introduction....................................................................... 7
CHAPTER 1
Capitalist Crisis and the Crisis of Capitalism................... 13
CHAPTER 2
Unity and Changes in the Ideology
ofP olitical Economy........................................................ 27
CHAPTER 3
Is Social History Marked
by Overdetermination or Underdetermination?................. 49
CHAPTER 4
Social Revolution and Cultural Revolution....................... 57
CHAPTER 5
From the Dominance ofE conomics to that of Culture:
The Withering Away of the Law of Value and Problems
of the Transition to Communism...................................... 65
CHAPTER 6
Postmodernism—A Neoliberal Utopia in Disguise?..........93
CHAPTER 7
Communication as Ideology............................................123
CHAPTER 8
Pure Economics,
or the Contemporary Worlds’ Witchcraft...........................133
Bibliography.....................................................................147
Index................................................................................153
Introduction
For the last century and a half, the spectre of communism has
been haunting the world. Like any other spectre it can never be
suppressed once and for all, even though it often happens that
those fearing its menace are able, for a while, to get it out of their
minds. And at each of those times they repeat the same orgiastic
spectacle of gluttons falling over each other to grab even more
riches, to gorge themselves on even more extra helpings from the
table, and to take whatever drugs they hope will relieve their
indigestion. They all repeat in chorus the same catch-phrases:
“Marx is dead,” “History has reached the end of its voyage, and
nothing will ever again change,” “Here we are, and here we stay
for evermore!” Some really believe that their dream world will last
to all eternity. Others, troubled despite everything by a slight
inquietude, look around themselves and murmur, “We really have
to do something for everyone we keep away from our party: perhaps
we should hand out some scraps from our feast to those poor
souls. ” Meanwhile, among the innumerable victims there are those
who cry over their fate, those who take refuge in ever-repeated tales
of their glorious struggles in the past but who understand nothing
8 SPECTRES OF CAPITALISM
of the causes for their recent defeats, and those who resign them­
selves to their condition and think, “God is with our enemies, there
is nothing to do but hope for a softening of their hearts while we
huddle at the fence over which they toss their leavings.” But there
are also some who calmly call for a meeting of those who can
analyze the new situation, take the measure of the strengths and
weaknesses of both camps, understand the challenges confronting
their peoples, and in this way prepare for tomorrow’s struggles and
victories.
One hundred fifty years after the Communist Manifesto was put
forth, we are once again in one of those moments when the
gluttons hold their orgy. But this momentary triumph of unre­
strained capital is not accompanied by a brilliant new expansive
surge for capitalism but by the deepening of its crisis! Thus, the
boundless appetite of capital, given full scope by the momentary
weakening of its adversary class, in fact shows explosively the
absurd irrationality of this system. The inequality that it promotes
undermines its possibilities for expansion. It expands consumption
in a distorted manner by favoring wholesale waste by the rich, but
this in no way compensates for the poverty to which it condemns
the majority of workers and peoples, who become ever less suc­
cessfully integrated into its system of exploitation. So capitalism,
by its very logic, reduces them to a marginal status and settles for
mere crisis management, which it can do just as long as the social
power of its adversaries is not reconstituted. This paradoxical
victory of capital giving rise to its prolonged crisis is only apparent
if we cool off by reading the Communist Manifesto and recall to
our memory the plain reason for this: capitalism is incapable of
overcoming its fundamental contradictions.
To destroy the conquests of the working classes, to dismantle
the systems of social security and employment protection, to
INTRODUCTION 9
return to poverty wages, to bring certain of the peripheral countries
back to their outmoded status as providers of raw materials while
limiting the opportunities of those who have become relatively
industrialized by imposing the status of subcontractor on their
productive systems, and to speed up the squandering of the
resources of the planet: such is the program of the currently
dominant forces. This permanently reactionary utopia expresses
the deepest desire of the gluttons whose arrogant self-affirmation
bursts out all over at historical moments like our present one.
The critique of current intellectual fashions that I put forth in
this contribution to the sesquicentennial of the Communist Mani­
festo will accentuate the nullity of this reactionary utopia.
In the first place, its scientific nullity, nullity of this “pure
economics” which claims for itself the title “neoclassical,” even
though it stands at the opposite pole from the method of classical
economics and which applies itself laboriously to the task of
proving what can never be proved: that markets are self-regulating
in a way that produces a natural, general equilibrium which is the
best possible for society. Marx, free from the morbid preoccupa­
tion of bourgeois ideologies (which is to legitimize capitalist
society through declaring it definitively unsurpassable, the End of
History) reminds us simply that to believe in a natural equilibrium
governing society is to believe in something absurd, which can be
sought only in blind alleys. In place of this false question Marx
poses the real task, which is to analyze the contradictions of the
system, those which define its historical limits. A rereading of the
Manifesto, in todays world, makes apparent immediately and con­
vincingly the superiority of Marx’s century-and-a-half-old analysis.
It remains closer to today’s reality than all the neoliberal effusions
of an economics that goes whichever way the wind blows. And
that empty economics has its pale complement in the enfeebled